This Native poetry anthology includes 240 poems and 160 poets from nearly 100 indigenous nations located on the Western Hemisphere. I particularly appreciate that a short biography was included for each creator and look forward to pursuing the individual works that this anthology has oriented me towards!

Postcolonial Love Poem By Natalie Diaz

This is my first dip into the deep well of Natalie Diaz. Immediate reverence for her style. This collection involves the bodies of Latinx, indigenous, black, and brown bodies, navigating sensuality and violence in equal part. I look forward to reading When My Brother Was an Aztec which comes highly recommended.

Dwellings by Linda Hogan

I would love to go on a walk with Linda Hogan. Her awareness to the natural world is inspiring. Her observations are simple, elegant, elemental. You can tell she lives her poetry:

I love this inner earth, it’s murmuring heartbeat, the language of what will consume us. Above is the beautiful earth that we have come from. Below is heat, stone, fire. I am within the healing of nature, held in earth’s hand.

She makes me want to be a better human. This book contains myriad instructions towards this aim. I would particularly recommend “What Holds the Water”—this story touches on themes of hope and despair, particularly in regard to ecological destruction, and the deep social alienation that we are confronting as a collective.

Loba by Diane di Prima

This notable work is part of the Beat canon. I’ll be honest, I wanted to like this more than I did. Perhaps it was timing—after listening to indigenous writers this material felt a little hollow, a little juvenile. My response might also be due to the fact that I found out she was quite involved in the Western occult. Personally, I don’t have much patience for a lot of magical traditions, but because di Prima was an activist, at least she cleaved to her personal convictions. I did enjoy the strength of her voice, and found some aesthetic value in the imagery, and vocabulary she used. Nonetheless, this would have made more sense to me when I was a teen, and missed the mark for me today.

Upstream by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver, you humble bee. Her love and care shines through in this collection of essays. My favorite stories featured an injured gull, and a spider. Like many of the authors that I have read in the past couple of weeks, Oliver writes from outside of the anthropocentric lens. Her notes on living are as clear and crisp as the arrival of autumn.

Some of the my resounding advice my Dad has given me was to not become too preoccupied with finishing the daily list, lest we become driven by a mechanical need. I’m listening to this now, seeing people in so many ways attempt to clear a slate which cannot be. The core world which we come from is in a natural state of constant shed, revolution, death. Life. This chaos of being, the one hardest to face with calm, is what I have been working intimately with. Tending, noticing, feeling, responding. I cannot be content with the easy comfort of reactivity, I know I come from something too great. This greatness walks with me, and offers me shade from the heat of friction. We work together, because I am intelligent enough to cooperate, aware enough to realize I am small, brave enough to accept the powers that be, entrusted enough to wield a heart, beating with the potential to spread love. My competition is wildfire. Of course, I cannot keep up, I cannot win this, but I will love every moment as deeply as I may.

Last Friday Chicago was overtaken with smoke that exceeded the EPA’s air quality index. I wore a mask, and noted that it was only a small population of us who did. The first person I saw, in fact, was someone smoking a cigar. This behavior, this density, I am coming to terms with, in this dirge of the natural world. It is a wake, lived in real time. I walked with some loved ones in the evening, both of whom grew up around LA county, and are accustomed to extreme values in air pollution, from industry and wildfires. It was comforting, and necessary, given the hazard of moving outside that day—given how we all felt like we lost brain cells that day, given how none of the birds can mask themselves. I fear. Without change, we will also start to notice more and more bodies of the innocent on the ground. But, because of my company, and my own process of spiritual maturation, I remember that I have two hands.

One hand holds grief: screaming, pleading others to awaken, hoping with all my might that I might wake up with supernatural powers so I can go to the Capital and destroy those who have forgotten their human heart and place in the context of our great world. One hand holds love, and love squeezes back.

We admitted that we were human beings

and melted for love in this desert

Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet

I get to dance class 1.25 hours early. I go to the library and walk the aisles, finally landing on Natalie Diaz. I return to Old Town School Of Folk Music, and relish the same lively quiet that the library possesses. A little person arrives with their adult. Her father seems tasked to the gills, she is a ball of energy. I hope to god she has adults around her that understand she is not distractible, but full of curiosity, and capable of multiple thoughts in tandem. She climbs behind me, and shares her thoughts as they arrive. I can tell her parents love her so much, because she smiles and laughs, she is at ease in this world, and I know this is a sacred gift of guardianship. She is protected. My thoughts always stray to Motherhood. I want a child of my own, but I have always been too intelligence and practical to copy my DNA—there are too many who are not dignified, or revered, we need more people who are parents in a broader sense, there are so many children in this world, small and large alike. I leave this thought for now. Perhaps I will adopt later, but for now I let my virtues lead; there are many ways to serve children in this world, I know.

Small one bounces to class. I hear the beginnings of a guitar class begin. Like hearing people speak in a foreign language, I cannot help but listen to those who possess a didactic tongue. My ears perked when he mentioned Prine. Of course he was an alumni, that poet priest of the spoken language. I close my eyes and smile, knowing he was in this building, everything is sanctified by poetry. Sorry (not sorry) for being “distractible.”

I spend the rest of the day in doing, so the next day I may be. I make time, and feel its mundane magic the following day. I practice rope dart by the lake. The air has cleared, and the holy lungs of the world make me feel tiny, and amazed. I finish my play by sitting by the water, and taking out my singing bowl. After I finish, a man and I meet each others eyes and smile. It is such a kindness to have an interaction with a man that feels untainted, unmotivated. He wondered at how resonant the bowl was. I smiled to myself. I was apologizing to the natural world the entire time, with solemn love—for fireworks, for cigarettes, for unfettered production, for fire, for human poisons. I wonder, too, how far the sound I make resonates. I hope. I sing into that hope like the open mouth of a lover—I cup its ear and silently say, “I love, I love you, I love you more than any one.” We soften in the moment together, I think of the only biblical verse that means anything to me: For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. We are god here in this moment, inspiring, expiring. As I pack my things he speaks from this holy recognition, “It forced me to stop and meditate for a moment, thank you. Keep being you.” I will. With all my heart, and as long as there are people like you, I promise.

I love. A cup of yamamotoyama genmaicha. I love that I didn’t edit a lick of this because that time does not exist. I am myself, proud, in the dying of the world I love so much, I live.

I have 37 days before I am once again at the mercy of my academic studies, so I will squeeze every drop I can. I will never be duped by those who obfuscate again. Wisdom breaks the canon. Breaks it off in your ass.

What I’ve read last week:

blood snow by dg nanouk okpik​​

Like other fellow Native Alaskan poets, dg nanouk okpik recognizes the reality of grieving a world that has become increasingly threatened by the fugue state of the oil industry. As a Native woman who was adopted by white parents, she also speaks to the complexity of cultural disruption. She captures these particular yet splintered pains succinctly. The work feels guided by the desire to know and reclaim home. In this process she reveals her connection in the magnitude of her voice which channels the landscape of her origin. She speaks to Arctic roots—of the Inuit, who live on marine fat and the kind of resilience descended from long journeys and bitter winds. Her clarity demands sensory engagement. One cannot read her poems without involving one’s body. My favorite two poems in the collection were “Her New Moon Enigma” & “Physical Thaw.” As promised, this penetrating work engages grief, blood, and cold.

Don’t Call us Dead by Danez Smith

I bet Danez Smith changes the atmosphere of a room. I’d love to see him live, I’d love to see his eyes as he exercises truth. Smith meets his bravery with volatile vulnerability. His is the genuine kind of courage; he is a mam who relaxes into pain, rather than bracing for its blows. Smith offers readers the smooth stone of observation that he has polished along the bumpy road of grief and love. I highly recommend listening to readings, his spoken word is fierce.

His poem Dinosaurs in the Hood refuses the flattening of Black life into spectacle or tragedy. It insists on a story where the Black boy lives, and plays, where joy and danger and absurdity coexist without collapsing into a single narrative of pain. Not an Elegy for Mike Brown does something harder, recalling the tragic shooting and killing of 18-year old Michael Brown by a police officer. The officer was not charged. Brown had just graduated from high school, and was enrolled in technical college. No justice was offered towards his murder, and this poem sits directly inside this failure. The lines offer no comfort of elegy, and refuse to let the wound of mourning to close cleanly. No resolution = no resolution. A Note on the Body turns inward, toward a self that has survived all of this. This poem demands the body’s right to remain a body, not merely a symbol of generational trauma, or dissociation.

These three poems trace the same arc of outrage, grief, and double consciousness. They also shed light on the subtler craft of staying alive, of remaining embodied. Like any prevailing voice of resistance, it is a bittersweet victory. Danez Smith destroys the masters tools by showing willingness to channel rage, grief, queerness, tenderness, and innocence in one hand without letting any one of them become subordinate to another.

Happening by Annie Ernaux

Content warning: This book remembers upsetting, viscerally graphic imagery, including: an attempt at a diy abortion using two long blue knitting needles that were bought to knit a cardigan, two graphic descriptions of surgical procedures, and the repeated failure of men. Men, in this memoir, are careless, immature, and concerned only with themselves.

This is a true story of unrestrained, spare observation. Forty years after the fact, Annie Ernaux dredged up her journal entries and recollections from 1963, when she was twenty-three, pregnant, and living in a country where abortion was illegal. She unflinchingly recounts the shame and the profound anxiety of not knowing whether she would be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. She speaks to the reasonable naïveté of youth, of the deliberate suppression of sexual education, and abortion rights which violently impacts the embodied experiences of women, girls, and anyone capable of becoming pregnant.

Ernaux pieced ninety-one pages together from old diary entries from forty years in the past. The book renders roughly three months of pain and anxiety in intimate detail. At the moment when she aborts, she is with a girl friend who becomes her improvised midwife–cutting the umbilical cord, and untethering a three-month-old fetus from her body. Together they wrap it in a melba toast wrapper and flush it down the toilet—noting that in Japan, aborted embryos are called “mizuko”, water babes. After this severance, she begins to bleed profusely and is rushed to the hospital where the surgeon treats her scum, and she also nearly dies. Nearly.

It doesn’t read like a confession. Ernaux isn’t asking us to witness the horror for her own sake, nor does she amplify the hellscape she walked. It is something far more comprehensive, and filled with care. It’s a clarion and grandmotherly call to those who demand their rights, and are not afraid to tell their survival story:

“I walked the city streets, my body harboring the secret of that night... as something sacred. I couldn’t decide whether I had reached the outer fringes of horror or beauty. I felt proud. A feeling not unlike that experienced by lone sailors, drug addicts, or thieves, who have ventured where others fear to tread. A feeling that may partly have contributed to writing this book.”

This work is a rich offering.

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by The Friends of Attention (Author)

The Manifesto reads as follows:

“Something is seriously wrong. It has to do with our ATTENTION, our essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world. This precious capacity has been channeled, captured, and commodified by an industry of immense technological and financial power. How? Call it “human fracking.”

Human fracking is bad for people, and for politics. It reduces our very beings (and our relationships) to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold. All this is the triumph of a catastrophic lie about what it means to be human. But deceit and exploitation are never inevitable. To push back, we need more than isolated, individual efforts; what we need is a movement of collective resistance.

This movement of attentional liberation exists and has a name: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.

Attention Activism is a fight for justice. This emancipatory uprising takes our apocalyptic present, turns it on its head, and creates, from the chaos and confusion, new vistas of human flourishing.

Attention Activism is rooted in STUDY—a commitment to diverse forms of teaching and learning centered on attention (what it is, what it can be, what it can do). Attention Activism also requires COALITION-BULIDING—collaboration and solidarity across a range of communities who see attention’s essential role in human flourishing. Finally, Attention Activism means the formation of SANCTUARIES—spaces where people can gather, care for each other, experiment with different kinds of attention, and conceive brighter futures.

To discern the revolutionary possibilities of the present, we look to artists, thinkers, and dreamers. To bring those possibilities to bloom, we heed the countless Attention Activists who are already out there, devising new (and revising old) ways of giving their minds and senses to each other and the world.

These attentionauts and attentionistas draw on the wisdom of diverse traditions. Across uncharted terrain, emerging practices of joint attention illuminate new horizons of shared political power. Not only power, but beauty, and grace, too.

This is our movement: the free movement of attention in its fullness, freely shared. We call that transformative goodness ATTENSITY. Join us in this heightened and heightening glory—or let us join you!”

Each sentence of the manifesto is expanded in a corresponding chapter—structure which is quite welcome, particularly because at times it reads like Dr. Bronner’s ALL-ONE! manifesto gracing his castile soap bottles. However, this book is plenty humorous, and has enough self awareness to be taken mostly seriously. To be honest, at this juncture, anything that does not subscribe to the politics of despair is welcome.

My favorite chapter involved so-called human fracking: the history of attention which has shaped our definition of attention today, and the ways our minds have been seized for marketing purposes. The book details how the early labs of the cold war era focused on attention by means of of cynernetic focus—aka, human to machine. Rather than, say, studying the attention of buddhist monks, yogis, or concert pianists engaging in a devotional form of attention.

See what they did there—to limit the scope of experience? to take it under ground so that those in power can limit and define experience as it suits their profit margins? This narrow, productivity-driven purposing of attention was made for the overseers of military, labor-force, and commercial domains. Eyeballs fixed, the rest of the senses dulled—ka-ching. This cybernetic model is a kind of mountaintop removal performed on what is actually a dynamic, holistic capacity, reducing it instead to an input-output system. This is the kind of attention that continues to be studied in labs, quantified by advertisers, and optimized by AI-driven search algorithms today.

In lieu of apocalyptic despair The Friends of Attention offer emboldened inspiration. I found it interesting, valuable, and encouraging. Fun fact, the term “attensity” was coined by a pioneering psychologist named Ediward B. Titchener who also invented the English word “empathy” as a translation of the German “einfühlung” which means “in-feeling” or “feeling into” and was originally used by philosopher Robert Vischer to describe the affective domains of art, and literature. Something worth paying attensity to, no?

Claire Denis’ 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail unsettled the French Foreign Legion before it was even finished. Its sensuality and unflinching attention to the male body made its real world subjects uncomfortable. This erotic unease is precisely the point. At its core, Beau Travail is a film about the systematic repression of desire, and sensuality.

The men of the Legion exist in restless drilling, marching, and sparring, and it is through this kinetic rhythm that the female gaze operates. This film is easily misconstrued as homoerotic because of the way in which androcentric cinema so sexualizes the human body. Denis feels. She finds values of beauty which men are conditioned to unsee in one another. We see sensuous grace, the kind these men embody in silence, pressed down beneath the weight of what they have been made to be. Her gaze moves toward tenderness rather than voyeurism, sensing the point at which beauty, desire, and violence converge inside hypermasculine structures. As Foucault might say, Denis turns ethics into aesthetics.

Major spoiler alert incoming 🔔

The film is narrated by Sergeant Galoup, a former officer reflecting on his time stationed in the Republic of Djibouti, a former French colony, under the command of Bruno Forestier. Galoup is devoted to Forestier with an intensity that is never reciprocated. When a newly enlisted man, Gilles Sentain, joins the unit, Galoup perceives him immediately as a threat. What drives him is not simple rivalry but the particular agony of seeing in another person the qualities you most want and least possess.

Sentain is elegant, capable, and mentally acute. More than that, he is generous, and has retained the secure warmth of his humanity. He is one of the only men in the film who expresses genuine personhood rather than a mechanical performance of soldiering. When Sentain risks his life during a helicopter exercise to rescue an injured soldier, or quietly offers his canteen to a man whose hands are bleeding from digging, it is clear that he has not surrendered his humanity to the institution. Galoup cannot tolerate this. He knocks the canteen away, unable to stomach that Sentain dares to exist beyond the Legion’s narrow social hierarchy.

This envy leads Galoup to sabotage Sentain’s compass and abandon him in the desert. Sentain survives, just as he did in his infant abandonment, and is found by locals, but never returns to base. On the assumption of attempted murder, Forestier sends Galoup back to France for a court martial, ending his career.

At home, Galoup wanders like an animal discarded by its pack, a man victimized by the very structure that gave him his sense of self. In the penultimate scene he makes his bed in precise military fashion, then lies on top of it clutching a pistol, reading aloud the tattoo on his chest: “Sers la bonne cause et meurs” — Serve the good cause and die. The eye of the camera finds the pulse point jumping rhythmically in his arm. Whether Galoup has taken his life remains unclear. The ending cannot be described. It can only be witnessed, and felt.

The setting of Djibouti is not incidental. The legionnaires are foreigners training in a foreign land with no real mission, enacting France’s post-colonial identity crisis in miniature. The abandoned structures, the desert, the eerie minimalism of the landscape all echo a decadent imperial presence. Authority persists as projection, outward and hollow. Denis draws a quiet equivalence between the emptiness of colonial power and the apparitions of masculinity that continue to animate it.

The military in Beau Travail is not merely a backdrop. It is the argument. What the Legion produces, in bell hooks’ terms, is psychic self-mutilation: men systematically hollowed out, their emotional lives excised in the name of discipline, their rich interiority replaced with empty routine. Yet Denis films what the Legion cannot extinguish. The lingering eye of sensuality. The yearning for humanity. The tender offer of a canteen. The pulse point beating in Galoup’s arm. Glimmers of a sincere, and unkillable spirit of mankind.

Galoup is the patriarchal enterprise made flesh, and its fullest victim. His value, his purpose, his meaning have all been outsourced to a structure that discards him the moment he escapes control. What dominance asks, in the end, is the totality of his submission. A man so fully absorbed by rank and ritual that he has no self left to come home to, forbiddewn to develop an interior life of his own, because the enterprise that made him demands domination where there might have been intimacy, and repression where there might have been feeling.

Sentain, by contrast, refuses to relinquish his humanity. He remains capable of devotion, tenderness, tensile strength, collaboration, and generosity. He embodies what Denis upholds throughout—that masculinity cannot be dictated as a singular expression. His soul, as Denis frames it, will not submit to becoming a faceless soldier.

Beau Travail ends not with punishment or resolution but with a liberation that is provisional, ambiguous, and strangely triumphant. What Denis gives Galoup in these final moments is something the Legion never could—the freedom to feel, and the courage to be perceived. For the first time, he is not watching, he is watched. For the first time, he is not performing discipline but surrendering to a vulnerability that is ancient and truer than rank.

It is a liminal moment, poised between breakdown and becoming. Whether this is liberation or its absence, Denis does not say. She has spent the film asking what becomes of a man when the structure that made him falls away. Here, at the edge of that question, she steps back. What remains is his, and what we make of it is ours.

I tried acting, I tried charcoal, I tried dance, I tried photography, I tried writing, I tried climbing, I tried fire spinning, I tried rope dart, I tried yoga, I tried.

I tried christianity, I tried spirituality, I tried ecstasy, I tried nihlism, I tried therapy, I tried.

I tried Chantix, I tried Paxil, I tried Effexor, I tried Trazodone, I tried Zoloft,…

Read more

In colle…

Read more

Read more

I came to psychoanalysis.

It started seven years ago.

I started a more intensive traditional therapeutic route.

I went through CBT and DBT first as far as therapy and I found, you know, it helped me get out of bed.

but I realized that in time that I couldn't exist in the living room.

I found it to be tethered to ideological American traits that I find to …

Read more

The following squirt of somewhat disjointed opinion was inspired by psychoanalytic anthropologist Dr. Howard Stein. Specifically, his essay Historical Understanding As Sense of History: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Although I believe that a psychohistorical method should…

Read more

I worked 6 days a week. had surgery. I set aside time that I didn’t have to meet up with a family member. My school semester started.

Today is one of the first days I’ve had to sit and do nothing. The grief has started to roll in. In mere weeks, a backlog that feels like a lifetime. How does my body bear this. It doesn’t really.

Yesterday, I went…

Read more

I have seen it enough to know that there is always space to come into after a breakdown; I am beginning to see myself, and others as the whole people that they are.

I puzzle at it a little closer, after so many years of swinging from the pendulum, after so many attempts to escaping into the safety of my inner world. I have had a tendency, in distress, t…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

What a laugh—I’d been waiting for motivation, what a joke; I’m not a baby bird, and a hot lunch does not simply apparate.

The reality; I wasted most of my precious time in January. The beginning of this year was a rough start; my care was insincere; I let myself be distracted; I acted helpless…

Read more

Pandiculation noun

The involuntary stretching of the soft tissues; this action occurs in most animals and relates to the transitions between cyclic biological behaviors, particularly the sleep-wake rhythm (Walusinski, 2006).

For ex. cats and dogs stretching to the point of a shudder, upon rising from repose.

Read more

The CTA driver wished each of us a safe, and good day; a man my age balanced his coffee and breakfast perfectly as he crossed the intersection on his skate board; a little girl on the corner improvised choreo while she and her mom waited for the light to change; I caught the eye of someone boarding the train and she smiled without restraint, it was so p…

Read more

Read more

Read more